Does Jignesh Mevani have it in him to become Kanshi Ram 2.0?

Kanshi Ram was a Dalit Kautilya from Punjab who built the heartland’s Mayawati as his Chandragupta. It’s a good playbook for Jignesh Mevani, if he has the skill and ambition.

Is there a new Dalit factor unfolding in national politics? Can what has lately been described as Dalit assertion disrupt politics in a heavily election-laden season? And if so, does the rocket have the fuel to last until May 2019, or will it fizzle and burn out before that?

Further: does Jignesh Mevani personify this new factor? And next, who is he in political terms, a new Kanshi Ram, or a mere fizzle like Mahendra Singh Tikait or Col. (retd) Kirori Singh Bainsla? The Kanshi Ram phenomenon left a deep impact on heartland politics. The other two, despite wide Jat and Gujjar support at various points of time, faded away.

Dalits are approximately 16.6 per cent of the Indian electorate. That makes them a more powerful vote bank than the Muslims. In the pre-1989 years, the Congress could pretty much take them for granted except in some states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and later West Bengal. As with the backward castes and Muslims, the Congress started losing this vote there on.

Unlike the Muslims though, the Dalits never voted strategically or with a singular purpose of electing one party or keeping another out of power. This helped the rise of the BJP. In many key states, including Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the Dalit vote went to parties other than the Congress, which suited the BJP. Some, attracted to Narendra Modi, started drifting to the BJP too. Because the Dalit vote became so divided, it lost much of its weight.

Again unlike the Muslims, the Dalit vote is so widely scattered that it lacks the same ability to shift electoral fortunes in most states, barring Uttar Pradesh. On paper, the Dalit voter percentage is the highest in Punjab (32 per cent) but a large number of these are Sikh and political contests in that erstwhile two-party state weren’t really on caste lines. At the same time, if a bulk of this vote shifts to any one side in any state, it tilts the balance. The list of questions we posed early on, therefore, distils neatly into one: is today’s Dalit assertion and its leadership, namely young Jignesh Mevani, capable of bringing about that consolidation? That will be Disruption.

The potential rise of Jignesh Mevani can check one essential box: a charismatic leader with appeal across states. Since Dalits are quite evenly spread across the mainland, a party needs a leader to rally them. Until the mid-‘70s, Babu Jagjivan Ram did that for the Congress party. Since then, the Congress’s failure to produce and empower a Dalit leader is its biggest failure. We know that its leader of the house in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, is a Dalit, but he is neither empowered, nor charismatic.

The BJP does even more poorly here. Ramnath Kovind as President doesn’t count. He’s a decent man, a Dalit, but no leader. He is, at best, a fine symbolic presence. At a recent release of a political book in Delhi (Prashant Jha’s How the BJP Wins), I asked the author who the most important Dalit in the BJP cabinet was. He said Thawarchand Gehlot, and I asked the hall at Nehru Memorial Library filled with Delhi’s best-informed people, many of them journalists, what the minister’s portfolio was. Less than a dozen hands came up.

India is at an interesting juncture when minorities, Dalits and tribals do not have any key central ministries or chief ministerships, states such as Jammu and Kashmir and the north-east excepted. This is what creates Mevani’s opportunity. The Modi-Shah BJP is astute enough to see this threat. Further, they have the mindset of an all-conquering super-power, so they would like to finish a likely threat as early as possible. This reflects in the so-called over-reaction to Dalit activity. Bhima-Koregaon is the latest.

Mevani rose in the wake of the Una atrocity, as a limited, local, Gujarat phenomenon. Given that the Dalit population in that state isn’t particularly large, he wasn’t taken seriously as a political player. His initial politics seemed overwhelmed by a JNU-ite ideology that abhors electoral politics. This changed once he decided to contest. Then he aligned with a national party, in fact the most bourgeois party of all. As an MLA in Gujarat, he counts for many more than one. It also gives him the legitimacy to take the message to other states. He began with Maharashtra earlier this week.

Mevani has many strengths: youth, articulation, fearlessness, proficiency with social media, political and ideological flexibility. Also focus, as in targeting the BJP as the one and only enemy for now and using that justification to align with the rest. He also has some weaknesses. He comes from a smaller state, still carries the weight of a pronounced Left tilt that never works in the mainland outside of the Republic of JNU and a couple of other central campuses. There is, however, a precedent of a Dalit leader like him hailing from a smaller state but building a formidable politics in India’s largest: Kanshi Ram.

Kanshi Ram, a Punjabi (from Rupnagar or Ropar district near Chandigarh) also appeared on the scene from an unconventional place. He was a scientist in a DRDO lab, started reading Ambedkar and built a pan-national union of scheduled caste, backward and minority employees, BAMCEF (the All India Backward [SC/ST/OBC] And Minority Communities Employees Federation).

We saw him initially as a headline-hunter. In the unstable late-1980s he brought together diverse groups, including Sikh separatists, on his platform and attracted crowds. But nobody saw him as more than a nuisance. Soon enough he had outgrown and dropped them, much as Arvind Kejriwal dropped Anna Hazare, and Mevani, if his politics has to grow, might have to dump Umar Khalid. As Kanshi Ram realised 30 years ago, there’s no Dalit politics unless you are rooted in the heartland, and it can’t grow in conflict with nationalism, or even religion.

Neither he nor Mayawati dissed Hinduism or converted to Buddhism. As he would tell us at his baithaks, his “fight was not with Hindu gods, but with Manuwadis” who denied them to Dalits. Why would we leave our gods to them, that’s what they want, he would say. And Gautam Buddha? The Manuwadis will simply put his busts in their temples as one more to their pantheon of “teytees karod” (330 million). “Kya farak padta hai ek aur se?” (How does one more bother them?)

His first big political arrival was in the historic Allahabad by-election in the summer of 1988. V.P. Singh had resigned from Rajiv’s cabinet and Lok Sabha, accusing him with Bofors kickbacks and was seeking re-election from Allahabad, vacated by Amitabh Bachchan, in the wake of the same scandal.

It was our first exposure to Kanshi Ram’s kind of plain-speaking Dalit politics. “You’ve lived like animals for 40 years,” he would say, “I have come to make you human.” Three things, however, stood out in the campaign and the politics he constructed later, installing his protege Mayawati in power thrice in Uttar Pradesh.

One, he dumped anybody seen even vaguely to be a separatist, from Simranjit Singh Mann to Subhash Ghisingh. Two, that he repeatedly stated the nationalist and martial credentials of his family: eight ancestors in World War I, two in the second and two paracommando cousins killed in Operation Blue Star. His campaign was organised on military lines: painting brigade, pamphlet brigade, even a begging squad whose members went to Dalit bastis with cans to collect small change as contributions. The money doesn’t matter, he told us. It’s just that “once a sweeper gives us a rupee, he will reject a thousand from the Congress to vote for them”. Three, and most important, he spread the tent wider, attracting other groups under the definition of Bahujan Samaj. That’s how he created the slogan, vote hamara, raj tumhara/nahin chalega, nahin chalega. Later, he and Mayawati realised that to get power they had to co-opt the Muslims and some upper castes too.

This is what brought them power. It isn’t an easy playbook, but it’s a playbook nevertheless. Kanshi Ram was a single-minded political genius, a kind of Dalit Kautilya with Mayawati as his Chandragupta. Does Mevani have the same skills, talent, single-mindedness and ambition to shift to the heartland? We don’t know yet, but it explains to you why the BJP and the conservative Hindu elites worry about him.

6 COMMENTS

A little early perhaps to view Jignesh Mevani as a tall, pan Indian Dalit leader, but there is clearly a vacancy. At one sixth of the population, Dalits need to be better represented at the apex of power. That holds true for Muslims as well. To keep large, dominant groups away from real power, limiting them to token sops, will create social churn. For the first time in a generation, someone other than the Shiv Sena could bring Bombay to a halt.

Dosto yeh meri prophecy hai ki ab dalito ko aur jyada dino tak fool nhi banaya ja sakta hai either in the name of dharm or in the name of God as they think that they have patented God which is not case.Only dalits have to realise that God has not done anything against them which they try to show so that dalits keep on abusing God and these crooked people should keep on enjoying at the caste of dalits because they are creating the things.

It is next to impossible for anyone to become like a Kanshi Ram. He was a leader with great patience and his oratory skills were amazing. Jignesh Mewani, no doubt a leader but he need to be more humble and have some control over his choice of words.

The recent usurp in Caste Leaders is no coincidence. If Indians started voting in the name of Jobs, Infrastructure etc. the biggest losers will be these Caste leaders or the Dysnasty Chamchaas. The author here claims that CMs and Ministers in Govt should be as per Caste arithmetic and not as per the individual capability and this is reason for recent political development. So by this rational can author explain what development did Leaders like Mayawati brought to Dalits or UP when she was CM or when Lalu was at helm of affair in Bihar what did Bihar got??? The unfolding of Dalit or Caste groups in India is not at all coincident but a deliberate and mischievous Game Plan by Congress and its Chamchas to stop Modi. Shekhar ji as much as I have I followed you for years, I know you are turning blind eye to this development. Or look for my Writing on the Wall here ‘ More Caste leaders will erupt in those states where Elections are due. Gujarat was just an experiment. Now even well to do Caste leaders will erupt in stats just to oppose BJP and finally all these crony caste leaders will support Congress. DIVIDE and RULE had been policy of British and very well inherited by Congress. And now policy will be in use against Modi’

Unless Caste discrimination is eradicated from Indian Continent, these unrests will persist. BJP has once more fuelled this passion and the Congress is going to pour oil in it, so that it can burn till elections. If Dalits want to have a voice in countries political system, they should have their own party across India. If they are able to generate a good group of leaders, they can influence political decisions at the Centre.